eduki

E-Commerce Platform for Educational Materials

lehrermarktplatz, known today as eduki, is a web platform where teachers sell and buy the educational materials that help them in their lessons. Teachers sit on both sides of the marketplace: the people creating the materials are the same people looking for them.

Platform:

Web

Industry:

Education

Team size:

5 people

Country:

Germany

Project Duration:

4 years

The year started & completed:

2016

We took a teaching-materials marketplace from database structure and MVP through four years of development, covering everything from business analysis to quality assurance.

Scope and Objectives

Selling Materials

Teachers list and sell the educational materials they have made, turning their own lesson preparation into something other teachers can buy.

Buying Materials

Teachers browse and buy materials that help them in their lessons, saving the work of building every resource from scratch.

Online Payments

Payment handling through Omnipay with PayPal, so money moves between buying and selling teachers inside the platform.

File Conversion and Delivery

CloudConvert handles conversion of the uploaded material files, so what a seller uploads is something a buyer can open and use.

Focus Areas and Deliverables

Application and Environments

REST-framework applications were installed with the bundles the platform needed, set up across two separate environments: staging and production.

Database Structure and Entities

The database structure and its entities were designed first, giving the marketplace a foundation the later functionality could be built on.

MVP Functionality

The functionality needed for the MVP was implemented on that foundation, putting a working marketplace in front of teachers early.

Service Integrations

Prerender, Mandrill, and CloudConvert were integrated to handle page rendering for crawlers, transactional email, and file conversion.

Payment Integrations

Online payment went in through Omnipay with PayPal, and PayPal Sandbox alongside it so payment flows could be exercised safely before reaching real money.

Challenges Identified

Payments Between Two Sides

Money moves from buying teachers to selling teachers, so payment handling was abstracted through Omnipay with PayPal behind it, and a sandbox environment kept those flows testable throughout.

Being Found by Search Engines

A marketplace lives on its listings being discoverable, and an AngularJS front end needed Prerender to serve crawlers pages they could index.

Two Environments Throughout

Staging and production were separated from the beginning, so four years of continuous change could be verified before it reached the teachers using the platform.

Growing Past the MVP

The product went live as an MVP and kept developing for four years, which meant building a structure that could carry features nobody had specified at the start.

Results of the project

Growing the product from where we first approached it.

We can really relate to this project, having grown this product from where we first approached it into the platform it became.

The engagement covered business analysis, project management, design and UX planning, development, and quality analysis carried out to the standards of the industry.

Business Value

A marketplace that turns lesson preparation into something teachers can sell.

Teachers on Both Sides

The same audience supplies and buys the inventory, so every seller is also a potential customer and the catalogue grows with the user base.

Payments Built In

Transactions run inside the platform through PayPal, making the marketplace a commercial product from the point it launched.

Discoverable Listings

Prerendered pages and Google Analytics give the business both search visibility and a view of what visitors do when they arrive.

Four Years of Continuous Development

One team carried the product from MVP through four years of growth, keeping the knowledge of the system in one place as it expanded.

Tools & Technologies

Symphony

AngularJS

Git